Kill Your Resume: What About Using Science to Hire?

To those young graduates who are convinced a resume highlighting a comparative lit degree and fast-food work experience is holding them back from getting a real job, fear not. Startup Cream.hr is offering an alternative to resumes in its pre-employment test, a scientific barrage of questions that the company claims can unearth the perfect job candidates even if they don’t necessarily have the most relevant work experience or college degree on paper.

Founded not quite a year ago, Cream.hr uses a specialized test to measure a candidate’s task management skills, work ethic, intelligence, and what it calls the “Big Five” personality traits – openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. A psycho-mouthful for sure, but University of Toronto professor of psychology and Cream.hr co-founder Dr. Jordan Peterson developed the test after researching the effects of personality traits on job performance. His findings are published in several peer-reviewed psychology journals, including Journal of Personality and Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

Testing job applicants isn’t a new concept. There are already several personality tests used in the hiring process, but most ask you to answer questions on a Likert scale with a range from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” The thing is, most of these tests are designed to scrutinize your morals, not problem-solving skills, and you can easily provide fake answers that make you appear to be a more virtuous person than you really are. No one vying for a job would hurt their chances by agreeing that “It bothers you when you have to obey a lot of rules,” which is an actual question from the Unicru personality test used by large corporations. If you can’t figure out the right responses for yourself, a quick Google search will give you an answer key to the Unicru and other commonly used tests.

It’s not that you can’t fake your answers on the Cream.hr exam; it’s just a lot harder because there are no right or wrong answers. Instead of choosing if you agree or disagree with questions, test takers must rank a set of priorities, and answer the same questions repeatedly to make sure their answers stay the same.

For example, one question gives you a list of five personalities traits including “I am the life of the party” and “I am always prepared,” and you’re asked to rank them in order of your personal importance. Other questions bring up workplace scenarios such as working on a group project or dealing with a tight deadline, and a few questions test your cognitive abilities with IQ-test-like inquires.

On a scale of one to 100, test takers are given an overall “Cream Score,” and scores for task management, work ethic, and the big five traits. Companies can add the test to their job listing, and use Cream.hr to collect resumes and cover letters as well. Employers then get a dashboard of applicant results, which can be sorted by each type of score. Cream.hr says that point is for employers to narrow down a few candidates based on their test scores to interview, which cuts down on time spent sifting through resumes.

There’s a 25-minute test for entry-level applicants and a 45-minute exam for executive and management jobs. For employers, Cream.hr’s testing service starts at $99 per month for 50 assessments. There’s also the “Full Cream” package for $499 per month, which collects resumes, cover letters, and complete Cream scores for up to 350 applicants. For comparison’s sake, corporate testing company Criteria Corp‘s software license starts at $995 annually for a company with fewer than 25 employees and prices go up into the thousands per year as the company gets bigger. Cream.hr’s beta testers include photo site 500px, game developer Big Viking Games, and space robotics company Honeybee Robotics, all of which have used the service to hire programmers, engineers, project managers, and administrative assistants.

Cream.hr’s ultimate goal is to get rid of resumes altogether, because they are ill suited to actually measuring someone’s skills, says MacGregor. And that frankly sounds like a wonderful proposition for longtime job hunters and inexperienced college grads alike. But don’t think nailing a test is all it’s going to take to land a plum gig.

Evernote’s head of talent acquisition, Mindy Cohen, sees some hope for a tool like Cream.hr, but believes it’s just one piece of the puzzle when hiring top talent. “It could be a good screening tool initially, but hiring the right talent comes from putting the candidate in front of a well-calibrated interview panel,” she says.